Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Rustic or pastoral simplicity, especially as affected in literature; specifically, in Italian literature about the end of the seventeenth century, the affectation of classic simplicity.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • I have spoken of the movement generally, but it passed through many phases, such as arcadianism, gongorism, dubartism; and yet of all these phases euphuism was, I think, the most important: certainly if we confine our attention to English literature this must be admitted.

    John Lyly John Dover Wilson 1925

  • After all, forms of nostalgia or arcadianism – the Victorian revival of Gothic, say – have arisen, sometimes very productively, throughout history.

    Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past by Simon Reynolds – review 2011

  • And of this general literary feature euphuism is the most conspicuous example; for in its employment of alliteration and antithesis, in addition to the excessive use of illustration and simile which characterizes arcadianism and its successors, the style of Lyly is transitional in structure as well as in ornament.

    John Lyly John Dover Wilson 1925

  • The romance of chivalry, therefore, became old-fashioned; and it seemed for a time doomed to destruction until it received a new lease of life, purged of mediaevalism and modernised by the hands of Sidney himself, under the guise of arcadianism.

    John Lyly John Dover Wilson 1925

  • Waller was probably inferior to Lyly as an artist, but he happened to strike a vein which was not exhausted until the end of the 18th century; while the vogue of _Euphues_, though at first far-reaching, was soon crossed by new artificialities such as arcadianism.

    John Lyly John Dover Wilson 1925

  • Like a fossil in the stratum of euphuism it was soon covered up by the artificial layer of arcadianism.

    John Lyly John Dover Wilson 1925

  • The Africans 'greatest crime, after all, alas, has been their ignorance, their primitive ignorance, their simple arcadianism in morals and manners, wherein animalisms have had unguided sway.

    Africa and the American Negro...Addresses and Proceedings of the Congress on Africa Held Under the Auspices of the Stewart Missionary Foundation for Africa of Gammon Theological Seminary in Connection with the Cotton States and International Exposition December 13-15, 1895. John Wesley Edward 1896

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